Numlock News: November 25, 2025 • Portraits, Porcupines, Volcanos

Nov 25, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Portraits

When you become a committee chair in the House of Representatives, you get a custom-made portrait by an artist of your choosing, with support from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. These monuments to hubris also appear to be ways for lobbyists and special interests to plow money directly towards the egos of the members they aspire to influence. In the 1990s, Congress cut all funding for the portraits and opened them up to private donations. This decade alone, such lobbyists have thrown over $600,000 into portrait commissioning committees. For instance, from 2021 to 2022, 26 companies, trade groups, PACs and lobbyists pumped $132,500 towards a painting of Ways and Means Committee Chair Kevin Brady by artist Stephen Craighead. Brady’s successor, Rep. Richard Neal, got $128,000 from 18 companies, trade groups, PACs and lobbyists for his portrait.

Dave Levinthal, NOTUS

Spikes

Porcupines are delightful animals, generally considered to be big and dumb and slow. However, given the 30,000 quills, nevertheless creatures of some notoriety. Large rodents, they were considered pests for many decades and the target of dedicated eradication campaigns, with Vermont alone killing 10,800 porcupines from 1957 to 1959. State bounty programs across the country ended in 1979, but the population of porcupines has not rebounded. Evidence includes, for instance, vets treating fewer quilled pets. One issue with managing the populations is that porcupines are hard to track. They’re generalists that live everywhere, and they’re herbivores that don’t really eat any bait that biologists are capable of furnishing. In 34 years of camera surveys by the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in the Sierra Nevada, porcupines have only been spotted three times.

Shi En Kim, High Country News

It’s Happening Again

Do you hear it? That which is dead is rising, those that sleep are awakening, those who ask are receiving and they who beseech are heard. The bells… how they ring. With 15.7 million streams (up 14 percent week over week) and 9.7 million airplay impressions (up 82 percent week over week), Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has reached No. 8 on the Hot 100. It has emerged as No. 1 yet again on the Holiday 100 for a 66th week out of the 74 weeks since the chart originated in 2011.

Gary Trust, Billboard

UMass

The University of Massachusetts Amherst was consistently performing well in the second tier of NCAA Division I. That is, until 2011, when it decided to make the leap up to the Football Bowl Subdivision, and it has gone terribly. Now 0-11, they are ranked 238 across the entire NCAA. That is 53 spots below the next closest FBS school, meaning that there are 85 FCS schools and 15 DII programs above them. The team has won only 16 percent of its games since joining the FBS.

Daniel Libit, Eben Novy-Williams and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Hayli Gubbi

A shield volcano in the East African Rift Zone has surprisingly erupted after 12,000 years. Hayli Gubbi experienced a violent eruption that sent ash nine miles into the sky, which is not typically what you expect from shield volcanoes, as they mostly slowly ooze lava. Part of this is the location: the volcano’s region is pulling apart at a rate of 0.4 to 0.6 inches per year. Satellite data has also shown a bit of ground movement, indicating an intrusion of magma under the surface ahead of time.

Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American

Roundabouts

Studies find that roundabouts reduce vehicle accidents by 40 percent at intersections and reduce vehicle accidents that cause injuries by 75 percent. Some towns and cities swear by these intersections; Keene, New Hampshire, installed its seventh roundabout in 2023. Besides saving $200,000 per stoplight they don’t have to install, a 2018 study found that the initial bout of roundabouts led to a decline of 40 percent in airborne particulates. By 2031, the city of Keene plans to install four more. In Carmel, Indiana, an engineer estimated that the city’s 150 roundabouts prevented the burning of 20,000 gallons of fuel annually.

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, The New York Times

Instant

The global market for instant noodles is expected to grow 35 percent over the next 10 years and is projected to hit $56.5 billion in 2030. The market has multiple large players, but is still far from a single player holding total control. As of 2025, Nissin Foods and Ting Hsin each have 10 percent of the market, while Indofood, Toyo Suisan and Nongship each have a seven percent share. The remaining 59 percent of the industry is split amongst a bunch of rivals. That said, noodles from Korea are on the rise in the U.S. The combined share of Nongshim and Samyang has increased 6.1 percent to hit 29.6 percent in the United States, while Japan’s Toyo Suisan, Nissin and Sanyo Foods fell 6.6 percent to 63.9 percent.

Nami Matsuura and Hiroyasu Oda, Nikkei Asia

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